Sistemi di appropriazione e approcci alla riqualificazione delle megastrutture per l'edilizia residenziale pubblica negli anni 60-70. Il caso del quartiere Sant’Elia a Cagliari

This research investigates the issue of megastructures for public housing built in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, after the enactment of the law n. 167/1962 “Disposizioni per favorire l’acquisizione di aree fabbricabili per l’edilizia economica e popolare”. Based on urban theories elaborated in that period and based on the proposition that large-scale housing schemes can create new parts of the city, these estates have attracted strongly negative criticism. In reality they created mono-functional places where urban and social degradation became quite evident. The question of demolition/reconstruction has been discussed several times but today is an option considered not sustainable. The megastructures for public housing are urban utopias not completed because they were built without public services that would have created a high quality of life. As a consequence of the "unfinished", and because of the large scale of the space and the architectural language, they went through a gradual transformation from “conceived space” to “living space” thanks to the inhabitants that tried to satisfy their needs and desires. The study starts from the assumption that the relation between the original design proposal and the “practices of appropriation” can generate inputs for a redevelopment that considers what is already in place. The main objective is to propose a methodology for the analysis of the current condition that considers the relationship between space and inhabitant. After having analysed similar approaches and having investigated the concept of appropriation and the contemporary strategies for the redevelopment of two case studies (the city-building Corviale in Rome and the neighborhood-city Toulouse-Le Mirail), the research proposes a methodology applied to the Sant'Elia housing estate in Cagliari (Sardinia). The Sant’Elia housing estate, result of the urban experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, has always lived a state of urban blight, social decay, and a condition of "otherness" than the rest of the city. In response to this condition many redevelopment projects have been proposed. Several proposals remained on paper, so they have caused a sense of abandonment in the inhabitants. Nevertheless they show a sense of belonging to the place. The buildings were designed for a generic inhabitant and people who are now living there adapted them to their needs. These modifications, carried out to varying degrees of alteration, express their needs and wants, which the original project and the following transformations have not considered. Through analysing the space of living proposed by the original project, the “controlled transformations” and the “signs of appropriation” (transformations not controlled), the work comes to a critique of the recent master plan for the redevelopment of the Sant'Elia neighbourhood. Finally, the research offers some thoughts for a redevelopment that take into account the transformations initiated by “the action of living”.